Tales and Sales
I am just back from an awesome Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) communications and outreach event in Sydney, Australia. This was not my first time in Oz, but engaging with a regional audience eager for our Cloud UX message and PaaS4SaaS enablement, it was clear I wasn't in Kansas anymore.
Woah! A-Game time!
Over two days, customers, partners, and internal sales folks were treated to the best of Oracle Cloud user experience (UX) with a packed-solid, hands-on set of sessions that were all about the Oracle Cloud business.
Cloud UX PaaS4SaaS RDK released into the wild in Australia!
My main focus was on the Oracle Cloud UX Rapid Development Kit (RDK) for PaaS4SaaS and on selling to win business using the Cloud UX message.
Selling Cloud UX: Real Footy
This is the age of storytelling and demonstrating empathy with your audience. User experience is about keeping it real and resonating with your users, so I opened the selling with UX session with the story of a fellow Dubliner who is also an Irish and Aussie Australian Football League (AFL) hero: Jim Stynes.
Blue Monday: Selling that Cloud UX
Jim's contribution to Australia transcended mere footy team loyalty. His own empathy with an entire community was felt by lots of people in many walks of life, even if they had no interest in the AFL or football (apologies to Melbourne Demons fans).
Move beyond your demons: Jim Stynes (Image: Wikipedia Public Domain)
Jim kept it real.
I explained this importance of connecting with your sales audience on an emotional level to win business with the Cloud UX message, reinforced our Cloud UX strategy of Simplicity, Mobility, and Extensibility and our design philosophy of Glance, Scan, Commit, imparted best practices for engaging with customers using proven UX techniques, and closed out with some examples of how to do it all!
The Rapid Development Kit: Real Development
The Cloud UX RDK is now available for building Release 10 PaaS4SaaS solutions. Together, with Senior User Experience Architect and master of all things technical in the RDK, Lancy Silveira (@LancyS), we delivered a hands-on demo of what's in the RDK, how partners can use it to identify business opportunities for PaaS4SaaS, and then design and develop winning solutions.
A big emphasis was put on APIs as UX design, on how OAUX has made it easy for partners and customers to build web service integrations, and realizing the right simplified UI Cloud UX use cases that add value to decision-makers and end users.
Lancy shows off how easy it is to build great simplified UIs for SaaS and PaaS using the RDK live in Sydney.
Later we played tag-team with OAUX Director Greg Nerpouni (@gnerpouni) and his super-practical sessions on Cloud UX extensibility. We provided a deep-dive exploration of the RDK as Lancy stepped through the technical parts of the RDK, demoed the Oracle Applicatons Cloud Release 10 simplified UI page layouts, declarative components, SaaS task flows and services, and handled any technical questions about using the kit to accelerate the delivery of PaaS and SaaS solutions in productive, reusable ways.
I relayed more wisdom of the PaaS4SaaS crowd and RDK success stories, so nobody was in any doubt about the importance of PaaS and SaaS to customers, partners, and to Oracle. The cloud has changed everything about customer expectations about PaaS custom apps and SaaS extensions UX and their availability, and now we're giving the Oracle PartnerNetwork community a real enabler to meet those expectations: the RDK.
We also used this opportunity to gauge interest in building solutions using the RDK so that we can plan additional OAUX outreach and communication events in the region, to hear audience feedback on our approach, and to find out what typical use cases are being encountered locally for SaaS and PaaS in the Oracle Cloud.
The OAUX and Oracle SaaS Applications Alliances and Channels, APAC teams collaborate in Sydney: (L-R) Nicole Giovanetti, Shy Meei Siow, Geet Singh (@geet_s), Lancy Silveira, and Greg Nerpouni.
In all, this was one great event. I suspect you will be seeing OAUX boots on the ground in this region again shortly.
In the meantime, stay tuned to the OAUX channels.
Thank you, Sydney!
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